by Chris Holm
“Aw, listen to you, all cute and worried-like. We’re gonna hug it out when you get home.”
“Sure,” Hendricks said. “Then, when we’re done, we’re gonna find this guy and end him.”
Hendricks disconnected the call and left the phone in the bushes to recharge. Then he looked around for somewhere to lie low and get some sleep. He found a boat out back, behind the house—a twenty-footer that looked like it hadn’t seen the water for a couple years. He undid a couple snaps on its canvas cover and crawled inside. It was musty but dry, and the tiny cabin had cushioned benches.
Tired as Hendricks was, he dropped off almost immediately. As he slept, he dreamt of dying. Of rebirth.
And as the sun crested the horizon to the east, Hendricks awoke and braced himself for the long journey home.
33
The blonde at the bar wasn’t Garfield’s type. Big, fake basketball tits. Dime-store acrylic nails. Brown roots showed beneath her peroxide locks, and a quarter acre of spray-tanned skin bracketed either side of her tube-top-and-miniskirt combo. At first, he couldn’t tell if she was even winking at him, or if the gobs of mascara that made her lashes look like gothic Venus flytraps had gummed up, hindering her ability to reliably open both eyes. But Garfield had struck out with the first two women he’d approached, and this DC dive bar didn’t boast a lot of prospects at one thirty in the afternoon. Turned out this chick had a fondness for whiskey and men with badges, so he figured she was as good as he was gonna do.
Garfield and Thompson had been summoned back to DC late last night. They spent all morning in the director’s office. A debrief, he called it. It felt more like a dressing-down.
The director called the Pendleton’s disaster—his phrase—their biggest clusterfuck since Waco. Said the balloon drop—which had popped up in shaky cell-phone footage on YouTube and gone viral—made a mockery of the Bureau. Said Congress would likely have his head for his agents letting a suspect escape.
Thompson did her best to deflect the director’s ire, pointing out Pendleton’s was her op, but it was clear Garfield was largely to blame for what had happened— and anyway, she was ahead of the rest of the Bureau on her ghost, which made her valuable. By the time they broke for lunch, Garfield was pretty sure he was on his way to being scapegoated, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of spending the next four hours playing party to his own professional demise. So he told Charlie he needed to step out for some air and set out walking until he found a place that looked as shitty as he felt to drink his lunch. He eventually found a romantic prospect bleak enough to match.
“Lemme see your gun,” she slurred, her breath whiskey-sweet and tinged with a bitter menthol bite.
“Maybe later,” he replied. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket. It was his partner texting him for what must have been the tenth time this afternoon. He ignored it and returned his attention to his drunken companion.
She leaned in close. Large pores caked with makeup loomed before his drunken gaze. “Aw, c’mon,” she said. Her hand ran up the inside of his thigh.
Garfield tossed back his drink and closed his eyes. It was a gesture of self-loathing more than anything, but she mistook it for pleasure and slid her hand up farther. “That ain’t my gun,” he said.
“Coulda fooled me,” she said. “How ’bout we head back to your place, and you can at least show me your cuffs?”
Garfield looked at this woman—whose name, he realized, he’d never caught—and then around the bar, wondering idly at his chances of scoring something less likely to leave a rash. If she noticed, she didn’t let on that she cared.
Garfield snapped and wagged his fingers at his empty glass, and hers as well. The barkeep poured Beam straight for each of them without a word. “Fuck it,” said Garfield, a glass in his hand and a strained grin on his face. She clinked with him, they tossed back their drinks, and then they staggered out of the bar together, Garfield grimly resigned to do just that.
Charlie Thompson stood in the bustling hall of the Hoover Building, thumbing another desperate message into her phone. They were supposed to be back in the director’s office forty minutes ago, but Garfield was nowhere to be found. Thompson had begged the director for a brief delay, claiming aspects of the investigation needed tending to. He agreed—reluctantly—to extend the lunch break another half an hour. As it stood, she was officially ten minutes late.
“Charlie!” came a voice from down the hall. Thompson looked up to see her supervisor, Assistant Director Kathryn O’Brien, walking briskly toward her. She wore a crisp gray suit, a white silk blouse, and heels. Her hair was swept into a bun that suggested authority without tipping to severity. “I was hoping I’d catch you.”
“You barely did. I’m supposed to be back in with the director now.”
“How’s it going in there?” she asked, her hand lightly touching Thompson’s elbow, a subtle kindness.
“The only way it could, I guess—which is to say, not well. There are twenty-three people dead. One of them doesn’t seem to’ve existed before two years ago, which suggests he was in Witness Protection. Another was his shooter. And four of them were first responders, escorting what they thought was a witness to the hospital. There are seven people in intensive care who’re touch-and-go— nearly one hundred injured in total. My ghost is in the wind. Ditto the guy who tangled with him. I can’t blame the director for being pissed.”
“Pissed, yes, but not at you. You were ahead of the curve on this new hitter, Charlie, and Kansas City would have been even worse had you not been there. No one blames you for what happened.”
“Thanks,” Thompson replied. “I just wish the same could be said of Garfield.”
“I’m surprised to hear you come to his defense.”
“He’s my partner. And for all his bluster, he’s not a bad guy. He was trying to do good out there, the same as me.”
“Where is he, by the way?”
Thompson shrugged. “I wish I knew. He disappeared over an hour ago, and he’s not answering my texts. I’m worried about him; he’s been a wreck ever since the op went sideways.”
“Yeah,” said O’Brien, “he’s not the only one.”
Thompson felt a stab of guilt when she saw tears brimming in O’Brien’s eyes. The air between them was charged with the buried tension of words unspoken, like power lines beneath the earth. Thompson opened her mouth to reply—but just then, a crowd of suits jostled past. When they disappeared around the corner, it was O’Brien who broke the silence—her voice quiet, fragile, tremulous.
“You scared me half to death, you know. Reports from the scene were sketchy. I knew you were inside. I didn’t know until hours later you made it out again. For a while, I thought I’d lost you.”
A tear spilled over, cutting a trail through O’Brien’s makeup. Almost without volition, Thompson raised a hand to brush it away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Things were crazy. I didn’t think.”
“Goddamn right you didn’t think,” O’Brien said. “You couldn’t have called in?”
“You’re right,” Thompson said, her voice breaking. “I should have.”
They’d been together for six months now—the happiest six months Thompson could remember. She hoped that Kate felt the same. Times like this, she thought Kate might.
It was Charlie who’d insisted on keeping their romance a secret. Kate wanted to tell the world. But Charlie had always kept her romantic life separate from her career— not that it stopped the whispers and the dyke jokes from Garfield and his ilk. Chatting about relationships is so common among coworkers that the absence of such talk creates a void quickly recognized.
It’s not that she was ashamed of who she was—far from it. If the woman she loved were anyone but her direct superior, she wouldn’t give two shits what a few loudmouthed misogynists thought. But she’d worked hard to excel in the male-dominated Bureau, and she didn’t want a soul to think she’d done so on anything but her merits.
“Does your family kn
ow that you’re all right?” O’Brien asked.
Thompson nodded. “I talked to Jess a couple hours ago. Asked her to call Mom and Dad for me. You know what they think about me being in the field—I didn’t have the energy to get into it with them.”
“Have you eaten?”
It was sweet of her to ask, Thompson thought. After twenty-four years of looking after Jess, it was nice to have someone look after her for a change. “Not really. I had a candy bar from the machine a few hours ago.”
“In that case, when you’re done here, we’ll do dinner at my place. I’ll cook.” Charlie raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Okay, I’ll order.”
“I’d love to, but the fingerprints we pulled from the glass Garfield’s witness supplied are due back sometime today—I want to be around when they come in on the off chance they prove legit.”
“Oh,” O’Brien said, her disappointment obvious. “Okay. A rain check, then.”
“Any chance I could convince you to bring that order to my office?” Thompson asked.
O’Brien flashed a dazzling smile. “It’s a date,” she said.
34
The woman fucked like a Viking, thought Garfield— violently and with abandon. The way she yelped and hollered, it’s a wonder she didn’t have half the building banging on his door. Then again, Garfield mused, it was the middle of the afternoon—there might be no one in the building to hear her.
They’d gone at it once already, but she showed no signs of letting up. When he finished a second time— sweating, exhausted—and rolled her sideways off him in a not-so-subtle hint that fun-time was over, she looked back at him wild-eyed and smiled. Her hands reached toward him beneath the sheets. “Hell, lawman, I was just getting warmed up.”
“Pretty sure that’s a goddamned Indian burn you’re feeling,” he replied, rolling free of her grasp, his overworked bedsprings squeaking in gentle protest underneath him. “I’m gonna need to ice my junk, you keep
this up.”
“I know something that might just change your mind.”
“Yeah?” he asked, curious despite himself. “What’s that?”
“Same something that got my motor running,” she said. “But first, you gotta promise you’ll be cool.”
Garfield raised two fingers in the air. “Scout’s honor.”
“Your Boy Scout bullshit’s what I’m worried about.”
He rolled his eyes. She frowned briefly, as if trying to decide what to do. Then she grabbed her purse from off the floor and riffled through it. When she found what she was looking for, she held it out to him, her expression triumphant. It was a small hunk of emerald plastic, ovoid like a too-large Advil Liqui-Gel.
A bullet snorter. He’d seen the kind. They held two grams inside. The head shops that sold them would tell you they were used for snuff—just like they’d say those bongs inside the glass display case were tobacco water pipes. Maybe the old-fashioned pewter bullets you’d find in nicer shops were once used that way, but Garfield would put good money on the fact that no one had ever snorted snuff out of a plastic one.
No, these ones were just for coke.
“You want some?” she asked, twisting the lid and inhaling the dispensed dose.
“Uh,” Garfield said, voice hoarse. He was just shy of six months clean. Six months, and four dead bodies. More, if you counted the human wreckage Leonwood had left behind at Pendleton’s. By the sober light of day, Garfield knew he’d done his best to minimize the damage there. He knew those deaths, at least, weren’t on his head.
But half-drunk, twice fucked, and staring down a little bump that could make it all just go away, Garfield was inclined to count them anyway.
If he was headed toward chemical absolution, might as well clear the decks of as many ills as he could claim.
He took the bullet snorter from her and loaded up a dose. One nostril held closed. A short, sharp snort. Then numbness. Then regret. Then bliss.
The euphoria of coke’s a tricky balance. Too little and you come down quick: edgy, anxious, hungry for more. Too much and your heart races, your palms sweat, you wind up jittery as shit and paranoid as all hell—and good luck getting it up for the likes of ol’ What’s-Her-Name here. But if you ride that razor’s edge just right, you’ll feel good enough to flush your whole life down the toilet and laugh doing it.
He didn’t even notice she was riding him again until she was almost there: face flushed, eyes fluttering, muscles contracting involuntarily around him. This time, though, he wasn’t finished. Wasn’t out of steam. This time, he rose into her with everything he had until she wasn’t moving atop him anymore, and then he threw her down and kept on going—a God in his own mind, a stallion in hers, a grim, determined metronome making vulgar, parodic love to a lonely barfly in the middle of the afternoon to anyone else who might have seen.
Thompson finished with the director around four thirty. At five, O’Brien came by her office with Chinese. The fingerprint results came in a little before six. It took another hour for Thompson to obtain clearance to view the file they pointed toward—and even then, the file was heavily redacted.
She’d been worried the prints would prove a dead end. That the glass shards Garfield’s fake witness pointed them toward were no more than a red herring tossed their way so Garfield would provide the guy an exit. But as soon as she saw the grainy file photo looking back at her from her computer screen, she realized they’d hit pay dirt. God knew what the sadistic bastard who’d pointed them this way was playing at, but he’d been right about the prints, at least.
The photo was of a lean, fresh-faced kid—cheery, she could tell, but trying his best to look stern for the camera— whose features would soon sharpen into the man she’d seen kill Leonwood at Pendleton’s. His name was Michael Evan Hendricks, according to the file. A foster kid—no family listed—who found his way to Special Forces. The fields for group and battalion featured black bars where text should be—and the file was so slight, it was clear it couldn’t contain two tours’ worth of mission information.
That, to Thompson, suggested the government didn’t want those missions known.
That, to Thompson, suggested black ops.
And that wasn’t even the most interesting aspect of Hendricks’s file. The most interesting aspect was the fact that—according to the government, at least—Hendricks was dead, the victim of a roadside bomb outside Kandahar. Wiped out his whole damn unit, save one. She’d done some digging and discovered—in a document so whitewashed it was clear the bulk of it was bogus, a casualty report sanitized to feed to the press—that the sole living member of his unit was a man named Lester Meyers.
The document contained only names, so she had no social security number, nor any idea where this Meyers was from—and DOD was stonewalling her at every turn.
A quick search indicated there were a few dozen Lester Meyerses the country over. She had agents sifting through the information now, trying to determine which was theirs. Maybe this Meyers was still in contact with his undead brother-in-arms. Maybe he wasn’t. But either way, he might be able to provide them with some kind of lead on where Hendricks might be.
She was dying to share all of this with her partner, but Garfield hadn’t ever returned, and he wasn’t answering her texts. Her concern for him had blossomed into something more immediate, unignorable. Finally, she broke down and called him. After six rings, his voice mail kicked in.
“Garfield,” she said, “where the hell are you? Call me as soon as you get this. Those prints came back. We’ve got an ID on my ghost.”
Garfield woke slowly to darkness. The only light in the apartment was that of the streetlights through the blinds. His head was pounding. His skin crawled. His mouth felt like it was packed with cotton.
For a moment, he just lay there, taking stock. He knew that he’d fucked up big-time today. That he’d fallen off the wagon hard. That he might’ve just torpedoed his career. He knew he needed to clean up, fly right, and take his lumps if he
wanted to come out the other end okay, but he couldn’t quiet the voice in his head that told him another bump of coke would make everything all better.
He glanced at the woman who lay beside him, facedown and tangled in the sheets. On the small of her back, she had a tattoo of a cross—once black, but now faded to fuzzy blue.
Judge not that ye be judged, Garfield thought.
She’d set the bullet snorter on his nightstand. He reached over her toward it—trying not to wake her—but it was just beyond his grasp. As he strained to reach it, he slipped, and put his hand down on the edge of the mattress in front of her to catch himself. The whole bed rocked, but she didn’t stir.
And when he lifted his hand back off the bed, it was bloody.
Garfield rolled the woman over. Her throat was slit. Her eyes were open and glazed over. Blood soaked her side of the bed and dripped onto the floor beneath.
He leapt out of bed and scanned the floor for his holster, his gun. That’s when he saw the man pointing a Ruger at him from the armchair in the corner.
The man’s face was swollen and bruised. His right eye was rimmed with lacerations. Beside the chair were Garfield’s shoulder holster and cell phone, as well as one of Garfield’s kitchen knives—the latter streaked with gore.
“Hello, Special Agent Garfield,” the man said, smiling. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
35
Headlights drifted toward the shoulder in the darkness. The car’s front-left tire hit the rumble strip, and Hendricks jerked awake—fishtailing as he swerved back into his lane. Once he got the car back on the road, he rolled the window down, hoping the air would keep him alert.
He’d tossed and turned all night in the musty boat cabin. His injuries had nagged at him. The cuts on his hand and neck itched maddeningly. His bruises were hot and tender to the touch. His shoulder clicked when he moved it wrong, and felt like it was full of rusty nails. At dawn, Hendricks found the boat’s first aid kit and chewed four aspirin as he cleaned his wounds.
